simply as a compliment to the historian: and the oration of that most eloquent man Plato, which is written for Socrates, is worthy neither of counsel nor of client.” Footnote 299: _Insolenti Græciæ_ (_op. cit._, p. 59). I hope it may be hardly necessary to quote certain lines, “To the memory of my beloved Master, William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.” It is already known to students of Ben Jonson that Ben was soaked in Latin, especially of the silver age: and Professor Schelling of Philadelphia has done good work by indicating sources in his edition of the _Discoveries_. But the vein is not exhausted. Seneca and Quintilian were to Ben almost more than Browne and Fuller were to Lamb. Footnote 300: Seneca was born about 60 B.C., and was thus eighteen at Cicero’s death. All these things invite comment—the last most of all. I put aside, as entirely irrelevant, certain modern dubitations as to the genuineness of the Platonic _Apology_. They rest upon no warranty of scripture, and opinion is simply opinion, to be received politely, and to be “laid on the table.” But it is worth dwelling on the point that the _Apology_ as we have it, though to all competent judges of literature one of the capital works of antiquity, arch-worthy of Plato, more than arch-worthy of Socrates, might very well seem to a Roman lawyer unworthy of both, and might possibly have so seemed to Aristotle himself. For of all recorded _plaidoyers_ it is perhaps, in the temper of the jury and the circumstances of the case, the least likely to secure an acquittal, and the most likely to render condemnation inevitable. The other remarks do not matter so much; but it is of weight that a man should seriously put the difference between Declamation and practical Oratory on the same footing as the difference between poetry and prose. It shows how ill-adjusted, as yet, the grasp of literary criticism was, and also how necessary it is to keep an eye on everything that is said about Rhetoric, if we are really to master what was thought about Criticism. The introduction to the Fourth Book, again one of Excerpts only, gives the information that Asinius Pollio (whose works, if we had them, would probably be of the greatest possible value to _us_) disliked declaiming in public, but was, on the rare occasions when he could be heard thus exercising himself, more florid than in his actual orations. We can well believe it, and it shows that Pollio had the root of the matter in him. In the same way a man with critical sense will allow himself, in a rough draft, flowers which he cuts out in the most ruthless manner before he prints.